Mortgage broker gets 41 months in reverse mortgage scheme

Loan officer John Incandela, 25, of Palm Beach, was sentenced Monday to 41 months in prison, three years of supervised release and ordered to pay more than $1.9 million in restitution for his role in a reverse mortgage scheme, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Another defendant, Louis Gendason, 42, of Delray Beach, is scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 20 by U.S. District Judge William P. Dimitrouleas in Fort Lauderdale for his role in the $2.5 million scheme.

Working as a loan officer, Incandela, along with co-defendant Marcos Echevarria, 29, of Palm Beach, solicited seniors to refinance their existing mortgages with a reverse mortgage loan financed by Genworth Financial Home Equity Access, the Justice Department said in a news release.

To qualify the borrowers, Gendason altered real estate appraisals to fraudulently inflate the value of the borrowers’ properties; none of the borrowers actually had enough equity, the Justice Department said.

Based on the false documentation, Genworth approved and the Federal Housing Finance Agency insured more than $2.5 million in reverse mortgage loans, the Justice Department said.

As part of the scheme, co-defendant Kimberly Mackey, 47, of Pittsburgh, a licensed title agent, fraudulently closed the Genworth loans and did not pay off the borrowers’ existing mortgage loans, the Justice Department said.

Mackey attempted to conceal the fraudulent loan closings by preparing false settlement documents that showed that the existing mortgages had been paid off, the Justice Department said.

The defendants divided up the loan proceeds and used the money for their personal benefit, the Justice Department said.

On Nov. 3, Mackey and Echevarria received prison sentences of five years and two years, respectively, for their roles in the scheme, the Justice Department said.

The case was investigated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Office of Inspector General, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the FBI and the Florida Office of Financial Regulation, with assistance from the U.S. Secret Service and Genworth. The case was prosecuted by Kevin J. Larsen, a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Consumer Protection Branch, and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jeffrey H. Kay and Thomas Lanigan of the Southern District of Florida.